An­dre Wor­rell

In­com­ing chair­man of Ex­porTT Ash­meer Mo­hammed said the agency is com­mit­ted to im­prov­ing trade with the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) and ar­rest­ing the cur­rent de­cline in trade be­tween T&T and the EU.

Mo­hammed was speak­ing at the clos­ing and dis­sem­i­na­tion sem­i­nar of the Fit 4 Eu­rope Project at the Trinidad Hilton and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre yes­ter­day. The project, In­creas­ing Trade with The Eu­ro­pean Union, fo­cused on help­ing lo­cal com­pa­nies cap­ture busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties in the EU.

Com­ment­ing on the na­ture of goods and ser­vices trad­ed be­tween the EU and T&T, he said: "In Trinidad our non-en­er­gy ex­ports to the EU con­sists of food and bev­er­age prod­ucts in­clu­sive of co­coa and cof­fee, print­ing and pack­ag­ing, con­struc­tion ma­te­ri­als, per­son­al care prod­ucts, chem­i­cals and mu­si­cal in­stru­ments such as steel pans."

He said in the last two years trade with the EU had de­clined and this coun­try's ex­ports to its ma­jor EU trad­ing part­ner, the Unit­ed King­dom, av­er­aged US$6.2 bil­lion in 2014 and US$4.3 bil­lion in 2016, a de­cline of over 30 per cent.

"This rep­re­sents goods ex­ports on­ly with food and bev­er­age as the pri­ma­ry sec­tor." Mo­hammed said. "Ex­porTT in­tends to re­verse this trend by di­ver­si­fy­ing the port­fo­lio of ex­ports in keep­ing with its new man­date to cov­er ser­vices ex­ports."

Mo­hammed said the Fit 4 Eu­rope project not on­ly of­fered sev­er­al pos­si­bil­i­ties for firms en­gaged in man­u­fac­tur­ing, but for those in the ser­vices sec­tor as well.

"The Fit 4 Eu­rope project in­tro­duced new modal­i­ties such as op­por­tu­ni­ties for our lo­cal pro­duc­ers in co-cre­ation and repo­si­tion­ing in the glob­al val­ue chain, to­geth­er with a fo­cus on build­ing strong in­ter­na­tion­al net­works. I should al­so add that this is one of the few projects which fea­tured a sub­stan­tial num­ber of par­tic­i­pants from the ser­vices sec­tor.

"We were able to ex­pe­ri­ence the pletho­ra of op­por­tu­ni­ties which ex­ist for this sec­tor in­ter­na­tion­al­ly and will con­tin­ue to work with our ser­vices ex­porters and or­ga­ni­za­tions like TTC­SI and Cre­ativeTT to en­sure that the op­por­tu­ni­ties are con­vert­ed in­to busi­ness"